Scythebill 18.4.2 - easy location merging, family lifer maps, and bug fixes

Scythebill 18.4.2 is now available. I'm mostly releasing it now to get out some bug fixes, but it also has some new features - location merging is much easier, and there's a new "World family lifers map" in Special reports. 

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Easy location merging

Scythebill has a rule that any one "parent" location can't have duplicate names among its immediate "children" locations. This meant that if you were reorganizing your locations in Browse by location, you might have seen this annoying dialog, asking you to go read the manual to find a multi-step process:

Now, you'll see this dialog:

Just click "OK" and the two locations are merged. It works whether you're dragging-and-dropping, or editing the name directly, or using the "Edit..." dialog. It'll even merge multiple locations all at once if you drag multiple locations onto a new parent.

World family lifers map

If you're interested in seeing all the families of birds in the world (or all the families of mammals, or any other world taxonomy supported by Scythebill), you can now get a fast overview of what countries to visit. Just select Special reports, then click on World family lifers map. Here's what it looks like for a new user without any sightings (so, effectively, showing you how many families of birds each country has in total):

Not a world-changing feature, I'll be the first to admit, but it shows some fun facts. Indonesia has the most families of birds anywhere - 125. And what country in the Americas has the most families? Not Colombia or Brazil, which are incredibly species-rich; it's Mexico, with 96!

Bug fixes

There's a number of bug fixes - almost all of which were reported by users to whom I am exceedingly grateful.

• The Western Palearctic region only included the Asian portion of Egypt.
• Deleting a location used for a Trip could result in a broken .bsxm file!
• Generating a checklist spreadsheet for a non-bird taxonomy and multiple Australian states could fail.
• The "first anywhere" and "most recent anywhere" sighting options for checklist spreadsheets failed if you selected multiple locations.
• Some features of Scythebill rely on opening web pages in browsers (especially clicking on map links); these weren't working for some Linux users, and (hopefully) will now.

Scythebill 18.4.1 - mostly bug fixes

Scythebill 18.4.1 is now available. It's mostly out now to fix some import problems for BirdTrack, Faune-France, and Observation.org, but also includes one new feature as well.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Import improvements

BirdTrack imports were completely broken. I think this only started in version 18.4.0, but they should be working once again.

Also: Faune-France imports - part of the Ornitho family - were importing all locations inside Germany. That's now resolved, and as a bonus, those imports should automatically put sightings in the correct French régions and départements!

Finally, Observation.org imports should now be much better about picking the correct country in (literal) borderline cases - sites near the border between two countries. In general, Scythebill can now recognize country names in German, French, and Dutch.

Easier location editing

In Browse by location, the Edit... button let you change the name of a location, or pick a latitude and longitude, but not much more. Now you can use that editor to change the parent location, or add more detail (like putting a location inside a city).

World lifers map - for families (but it doesn't work)

The Special Reports screen has a new button - "World family lifers map". Unfortunately, I realized after I'd released 18.4.1 that the logic is quite broken, and the numbers are wrong. I'll have that fixed for the next release!

Scythebill 18.4.0: "First records" and trip improvements

Scythebill 18.4.0 is now available.  It includes a much-enhanced "First records" query option, some improvements to trips browsing and trips reports, and some smaller features and bug fixes.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

"First records" improvements

In previous versions of Scythebill, the "First records" query option let you get a list of world lifers, or lifers for a location or region. So if you wanted to know everything new for your ABA list on a trip to Texas, that was easy.

But if you kept other lists - like a "Photographed" list - there was no way in Scythebill to find what was new for that list. Now, it's easy!

When you choose "First records", instead of just a field to choose a location (or leave it blank for your world list), you can choose any report options just within "First records".  So if you wanted to find out what's new for your Photographed list on a trip to Taiwan, choose a report for Taiwan, and then "First records".  For "First records", choose "Photographed" and "yes".

Expanded "First records" options

There's one other meaningful improvement here.  If you use "First records" should be "highlighted", Scythebill has long shown a species list with lifers in bold. Now, when you look at the sightings for a species, the relevant sighting will also be highlighted. So if you were generating that "new for your photographed" list, and you saw a bird multiple times but only photographed it once, that sighting will be in bold:

The first-photographed sighting of White-rumped Munia is highlighted

Trip browsing and report improvements

Trip browsing now automatically shows endemic species - both the count of endemics present as well as those seen:

A successful trip to Taiwan!

Those endemics will also be visible when you generate a trip report.

There's also a new option for generating trip reports - "Show threatened status?" - which can include the IUCN Red List status of species (everything worse-off than Near Threatened).

Smaller features and bug fixes

eBird exports will now automatically combine imported location names below the city/town level. So if you've entered sightings for "The Ramble" inside "Central Park" in New York City, Scythebill will create eBird exports with "Central Park--The Ramble" instead of just "The Ramble".  This will, in particular, help users who import from observation.org and export to ebird.org.

Scythebill-format imports will, if you have multiple latitude/longitudes for a single location, automatically save a lat/long pair inside each sighting description.

The "centralis" subspecies of African Grey Woodpecker in the IOC taxonomy was incorrectly mapped to the "centralis" subspecies of Cardinal Woodpecker in eBird/Clements.  This is fixed, and I've attempted to automatically clean up sightings. If you've seen African Grey Woodpecker in Tanzania, though, I can't detect whether data is correct, and you may have a mis-entered species.

A bug that garbled the display for some Windows users after opening a menu has been fixed.

Scythebill 18.3.0 - AviList sneak peek and bug fixes

Scythebill 18.3.0 is now available.  It includes a sneak peek of the AviList taxonomy in "Splits and Lumps" and a bunch of recent bug fixes.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

AviList sneak peek

As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I don't plan on moving users to AviList until 2026.  But I also promised that I'd add AviList support to the "Splits and Lumps" special report, and that's now available.

Go to "Special reports", then "Splits and lumps". Now, in addition to showing how the current Clements/eBird or IOC compare to past versions of those taxonomies, they also show you how they'll compare to the current version of AviList (AviList 2025).

If you're like me, things seem quite pleasant compared to the latest eBird taxonomy:

18 gained, 10 lost - not so bad!

But IOC is a very different story, with lumps galore:

5 gained, 45 lost. Ouch!

Hopefully, this will prepare for the coming boon/onslaught to your respective lists.

I've also taken measures to ensure that all English names used in AviList are available as alternates for both eBird and IOC taxonomies, which should improve the quality of imports from any tool that uses AviList before Scythebill supports it.

Small features and bug fixes

• There's a new "Excel compatible CSVs?" option in Preferences, which will make Scythebill CSVs load more consistently in Microsoft Excel.  (Excel does not support line breaks within CSV columns;  it should, but it doesn't.)
• You can now create "Trip reports" in Browse by location when selecting trips.
• Sp. and hybrid resolution could produce error messages when using IOC.
• Observation.org/Observado imports should no longer sometimes mis-allocate sightings to the wrong country for sightings very near the border.  They also won't split location names on simple hyphens;  Sint-Elooipolder was previously saved as an "Elooipolder" location inside "Sint"!
• Imports that need species resolution now work for files that only have a common name or a scientific name, but not both.
• Multi-year trips (e.g. December-to-January) no longer always have the year range preceding the trip name.
• Browse by location's "Species you haven't seen here" option didn't work if you kept it selected while changing locations.

Scythebill 18.2.0 - Browse by trips improvements, privacy preferences, and more

Scythebill 18.2.0 is now available.  It includes a number of new features, most notably improvements to "Browse by trips" and new privacy options in Preferences.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Browse by trips improvements

The recently added "Browse by trips" page now has several new options at the top of the screen:

Lots of new features!

For starters, every time you select a trip (or multiple trips), you'll immediately see how many lifers you got on that trip. You can also enable "Highlight lifers?" to clearly show you those lifers.

It's also much easier to find trips - you can enter the name of a trip (in typical choose-your-own-abbreviation Scythebill fashion) in a new field at the upper left, then click "Jump to" to immediately select it.

And once you've picked a trip, you can find a species fast with a separate species name and "Jump to" button - here at the upper right.

Privacy preferences

The preferences page now has three new options:

By default, Scythebill will use Google Maps and eBird hotspot APIs to help compute latitudes and longitudes, or to find locations near latitude/longitude pairs. These requests do not and have never sent any cookies to those APIs, but if you're uncomfortable with those requests being sent to Google and eBird, you can now disable them.

Scythebill also defaults to using Google Maps to display maps around locations, and when you click a site icon next to a location name with latitude/longitude, it'll open a web browser with Google Maps.  If you're uncomfortable with that choice, you can now switch to OpenStreetMap, or disable maps altogether.

Scythebill also now includes a concise privacy policy in its Help menu, outlining what Scythebill does, or rather doesn't do with your data. I don't expect any surprises lurking in the text, but please let me know if you have any concerns whatsoever.

Other improvements

When you enter a location name, Scythebill will now prefer recently and commonly used location names, so Scythebill will give you local patches before some site you visited once in 1995!

You can also now enter "magic" location names, like the ABA region and Western Palearctic, in the "Jump to" option in Browse by location. Entering these will automatically select all the constitutent locations.  So, for example, "ABA region" will select Canada, the (continental) US, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and Hawaii, and give you the combined checklist.

Finally, the disk image files on MacOS now have a more useful appearance, making it clearer and easier to copy Scythebill into your Applications folder:

Bug fixes

• The "Enter sightings" table had a variety of visual oddities that cropped up with the interface refresh in 18.1.0.  It should now look more consistent and readable in both light and dark modes.
• When entering sightings, the Cancel button would not give you any warnings of lost work if you cancelled before you had entered any species. That could be quite annoying if you'd entered a long visit or trip description!  It now warns you much sooner.
• An odd and long-standing bug where a day-less date like "March 2003" was not considered after "February 14 2002" has been fixed.
• The "Jump to" species button in "Show reports" didn't work to jump to subspecies or groups, and now does.
• The AOS North region checklist omitted Cuba and The Bahamas;  this didn't affect your species list for this region, but it meant that (for example) reports would claim there are only 4 species of Tody, not 5.

AviList and Scythebill

This time, the blog takes a break from the usual release announcements to talk about the brand new AviList taxonomy, and how (and when) Scythebill will support it.

What's AviList?

AviList is a unified, global checklist of birds. After nearly seven years of work, it's just been made public. They plan to perform annual updates going forward.

A new checklist itself wouldn't be big news, but eBird, IOC, and BirdLife International; all participated in its development (as did many other notables), and have committed to converging on this single checklist.

When do the other checklists converge?

IOC will go first.  Its last release (15.2) is expected later this year, at which point their prodigious work comes to an end.

eBird comes next, replacing their taxonomy with the AviList taxonomy in October 2026 (though they only promise "near 100% alignment with AviList by its 2026 update" - emphasis added). I assume, but have not seen explicitly stated, that they will actually produce a custom taxonomy on top of AviList, adding groups and undescribed taxa on top of the core.

BirdLife - whose IUCN RedList assessments are included in Scythebill, but not its taxonomy - will take longer, as they need to perform new assessments on many taxa.

So... what about Scythebill?

It's clear that come the eBird update in 2026, Scythebill will be standardized on the AviList taxonomy (or, perhaps, the eBird extension, with groups and undescribed taxa), and will no longer need to support multiple bird taxonomies. (Though eBird's "near 100%" comment gives me pause.) This is great!

But what about now?  There are two issues with adding AviList v2025 as an additional taxonomic option right now:

• First, there are some shortcuts in the Scythebill code which assume two taxonomies (one primary - eBird, and one secondary - IOC).  Adding a third taxonomy means hunting down all potential bugs in this code, just to delete all that code in a year when we're down to one taxonomy.
• Second, AviList doesn't yet have an up-to-date subspecies list: "AviList v2025 started with a baseline list of subspecies from IOC v11.2 (July 2021), and this initial subspecies taxonomy has been largely carried through to AviList v2025". Because Scythebill uses subspecies (and indeed, relies on them for mapping between taxonomies), this is troublesome.
  

The first makes me hesitant to add AviList as a third option, though I'm not yet entirely ruling it out. The second makes it undesirable to replace IOC with AviList.  Because of this, my current plan is not to support AviList v2025.  And since the October 2026 update of eBird will (hopefully) make it silly to have both AviList and eBird, the simplest option is converging at that date.  As always, Scythebill will automatically update your records to that taxonomy when you upgrade.

I recognize this is a long delay, and birders are understandably eager to adopt this unified list.  That said, I believe the IOC 15.2 release will be very close to AviList v2025 at the species level (indeed, even eBird is already 99% aligned!), and I'm hoping that will be good enough for the majority of Scythebill users. If it's very different, I'll reconsider.

I do plan, though, to add the following features in the coming months:

• The Splits and Lumps report will let users see what AviList will change for their list, relative to both eBird and IOC
• All English name changes in AviList will be added as alternate names (ensuring that imports from AviList will be smooth).

Scythebill 18.1.0 - dark mode support, editable image names, trip links, and more

Scythebill 18.1.0 is now available.  It includes dark mode support - along with a general UI refresh, editable image names, trip links, and a number of smaller bug fixes.

As always, download here, and let me know if you have any problems, either on Facebook or by email.

Update: Scythebill 18.1.1 includes small fixes which should greatly improve the experience for Linux HiDPI users and also moderately increase text contrast in dark mode.

Dark mode support

Scythebill now supports "dark mode" - a mode where screens use light text on a dark background, instead of dark text on a light background. For many of us, this might be an irrelevancy - but for others, this has become a must-have feature for their applications.

Dark mode on MacOS!

You can switch the mode from light to dark on the Preferences screen.

On Windows and MacOS, Scythebill defaults to an "Auto" mode, which follows the operating system's choice.  Scythebill on Linux doesn't offer that feature, but you can still explicitly choose light or dark.

As part of this update, many aspects of the UI have been refreshed and cleaned up.

Editable photo names

If you add a lot of photos to Scythebill, especially off webpages, you're likely tired of seeing names like "AF1Qip....";  Scythebill just showed the last part of the URL.  Now, there's a small pencil icon on names, and you can easily edit names, so when you've added a photo:

... then click the pencil, type a name...

...and hit "Enter" (or just select anything else on screen), and done!

Trip links

Trips now let you attach links, so you can attach trip reports, group photos, or anything else you'd like to remember as part of the trip.  As with photos, there's a "pencil" you can click to easily edit the name:

Smaller fixes

• The two Sinai governorates of Egypt are now properly included in Asia.  (There are three governorates which are in both Asia and Africa, and these are all still in Africa.)
• The provinces of Nepal have been updated to follow the current eBird (and Nepalese!) arrangement of 7 provinces.
• A few issues with editing sightings in Browse by location have been resolved.